Eric Goldman of Marquette has some very insightful things to say on the topic of getting a teaching job in a series of blog posts that you can access here. He and I agree about a whole lot, but there is one cliche he invokes that I resist: “Law professors,” he writes, “say that we have the best job in the world and that we can’t believe we get paid to do what we do.” If you like to teach and publish then indeed we have do a wonderful job. I would rather be a law professor than anything else, including a judge. But being a law professor is lots of work (or it is if you do the whole job) and I fully expect to get paid for it. Especially as I am hopefully making it possible for lots of students to get paid lots of money over the course of their careers, while bringing credit to the law school with which I am affiliated which, in turn, increases the value of the degree we are imparting on students. Moreover, since you can always do more reading and writing and speaking–and the more successful you are the more opportunities you have to write and speak–in a sense a law professor-scholar is never really off the clock. So lets leave the “I would do it for nothing” rhetoric to the movie actors (who demand millions in salary).
Second, and more seriously, a junior professor from a school ranked by US News in its Tier 4 (the lowest) writes:
Thanks for making the point about affiliation and faculty quality. . . . I’d also like to second your observation about scholarship. One of the worries I had about coming here concerned whether I’d be able to place articles in journals where they’d be likely to get noticed. . . . But I’ve submitted two articles since I’ve been here, and they’ve both ended up in “top 20” journals. In fact, with this most recent article I had the experience of my dreams: three offers from very good journals within the first week of sending it out (and, I subsequently learned, I was likely to have received offers from at least a couple others if I hadn’t shut the process down). So yes – it is very possible to place things well and, I’m hoping, to get noticed as a scholar.
I am pleased to hear this confirmation, but not surprised. This was not always the case, but thanks to the enlightened policies of many top law reviews, and the fact that smart intellectually-inclined law professors-scholars now teach at all tiers of legal education, it is certainly true today. Those who have the hardest time publishing well these days are scholars writing in specialized fields, or using technical methods, that law review student editors find hard to appreciate or evaluate. But that is another story.
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